Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “Singing in the Dark”

We’ll turn for the sermon text to Luke chapter 2 and I’ll read verses 29 through 32. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Luke 2:29-32.

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word. For mine eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful day. We thank you for the arrival of these two young girls with the Evans this morning. And what a delightful Christmas that makes it for all of us here. Help us Lord God to sing songs with delight today. And help us to understand the reason for the song that we sing. Help us Lord God to understand these four songs recorded in the Gospel of Luke in chapters 1 and 2 and transform our lives. Make this a joyous day for us, Lord God, as we recognize the loving care that you extended to each of us, bringing us into light out of darkness. And we pray, Lord God, that we would see things in your word that would cause us indeed to depart from this place today in peace.

In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Christmas of course is a time of joyful singing and I think that if we took the time to examine all the different religions of the world, Christianity is one that has far more hymnological maturation of singing and development. Doug H. has taught us that the very development of polyphony is really based upon a doctrine of the trinity that all other faiths reject. Our music is a reflection of some very essential truths of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I think it’s unusual for men to sing at all. You know, it seems sometimes a little strange, singing, leading our families in song. I mean, in a way it’s natural, but in a way we sort of feel a little self-conscious. Well, song is of the essence of the celebration of Christmas. It’s a response of the human soul and spirit to the wonderful news that the Christmas season reminds us of—the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity and the tremendous blessings, the recreation of the world. There’s really no other way to describe it. And that’s the sort of language the scriptures use that was accomplished with the coming of the second Adam.

Song is a wonderful thing and it is good for men particularly to be manly about it and to sing loudly and joyfully these tremendous Christmas songs in our household and here in church as well.

There are four songs in these first opening chapters of Luke’s gospel that center around the birth of Jesus. The first one is what we could call Mary’s song, the mother of our savior who sings the Magnificat. These songs have these Latin terms that are simply the first words in the Latin version of these songs. And so Magnificat—”my soul hath magnified the Lord” in the Latin—”magnified the Lord” is the first phrase. So Magnificat.

But it’s Mary’s song, the mother’s song. And the next song—and this of course happens, you know, with her singing the wonderful news. This is not the birth of Jesus. The baby Jesus has become incarnate and dwells within her. And she sings this in terms of her visit to Elizabeth, probably three months after the actual conception of Jesus Christ.

The next song of course is the song of Zacharias, John the Baptist’s father. And we call this song the Benedictus—”blessed be the Lord God of Israel”—the first line of it. And so this is Zacharias’s song and it’s sort of interesting to think about the development of these songs.

First we have this royal element. You know, Mary and her Jesus’s adoptive father Joseph from the tribe of David. This sense of royalty and kingship and we’ll see as we look at the Magnificat that this whole idea of the rule of Jesus Christ as king is certainly there. And then when we move to Zacharias, he is a priest and his song seems more priestly in content. Again, as we’ll see as we look at it, he’s a father—John the Baptist’s father. His song is kind of a neat one because, at least the way the scriptures record it for us, it appears to be the first words out of his mouth after he had been struck mute because of his disbelief of the angel’s proclamation of the conception of John by Zacharias’s wife.

He questions this and he then loses his ability to speak for nine months. And I suppose this also, we could see it in the broader development, the kind of—you know, unable to lead one of the courses of priests—sort of be part of the courses of priests that would regularly sing in the context of the temple services. The old world is going to pass away. It’s becoming mute. And Zacharias regains his voice with the naming of John the Baptist at his birth.

But his naming—the naming of these, John and Jesus—you know, predicted ahead of time. The parents were told what to name them. But the naming actually occurs at the point of their circumcision, on the eighth day. Again, this new creation idea. And sometimes on naming services, the name of Jesus is the name of John is given. Well, Zacharias—people want to know who the name is and he writes out because he can’t talk: John.

And people then, you know, say this is an amazing thing because there’s no John in this family. And so this is a divine name given to him through Zacharias. And at least the way the text is written, it appears that as the angel unstops Zacharias’s tongue, brings back speech to him, he sings this wonderful song.

Now, we call them songs because there’s a metrical character to them and the way they look is different than prose in the Bible. So these are songs and so it’s kind of neat to see the—you know—the transition of the old priesthood and the muteness and what’s going to happen is Jesus is going to open the tongues of the priests and bring forth a new priestly nation, new creation, and it’s a world again that will sing. Remember that Adam—you know, when Eve was brought to him—burst forth in song at the wonderful joy of this. And so we have this bursting forth of the mute Zacharias in song. And so it’s a wonderful picture just in the fact that he sings.

We’ll look at, in a bit, in terms of what he sings. And there’s this development: So we go from a mother to a father.

The third song is the Gloria in Excelsis. This is the song the angels sing to the shepherds in the field at the very night of Christ’s birth. So we’re leading up to Christ’s birth with these two songs sung by Mary and Zacharias. And then the evening of Christ’s birth, the angels burst into the shortest of these songs, the one that’s probably most well known to us, I suppose. This Gloria in Excelsis—this glory to God in the highest. And so they burst forth and they lead this song. And there’s a reason why they’re placed there, I think, which we’ll talk about.

And then the final song is Simeon, when Mary brings Jesus to the temple—not for his circumcision, but after the forty days of separation of mother and child, for the purification ritual. At the end of the forty days, the child is brought and presented at the temple. And Simeon has been waiting for this. And the Holy Spirit—the Holy Spirit is very prominent in these stories. The spirit of God overpowers Mary. The spirit of God is what, you know, Zacharias sings in the power of the spirit of God. And Simeon—the spirit has told Simeon that he won’t die, he won’t depart until he sees the salvation of the world to come, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Simeon sings in the power of the spirit.

The spirit is evident, I think, and magnified and sort of put in first place in these songs because the spirit again is bringing about a new creation. As the spirit of God hovered over the first creation and brought light out of darkness, form to formlessness and filling to voidness, so it is here. And we’ll see that light is a prominent theme in these songs. The spirit of God is moving, indicating to these people what’s going to happen, empowering them with song, giving them these songs of Christ to sing.

The first Christmas carols we could say—that these songs are—and their themes have resounded and echoed throughout the two-thousand years, both through people directly singing these songs in various forms but then they inform our songs as well. They pull on all the songs of the Old Testament. If we wanted to take the time, we’d see, you know, dozens of citations from the Old Testament making up the words of these great original Christmas carols.

So we have this last song sung by Simeon. So we have a kingly mother, a priestly father of John. At least the priestly office seems to be the focal point there. The angels sing of the relationship of heaven and earth. And then an average guy—average Joe, we could say—not average, but a holy, righteous man, devout. But not identified, even his tribal name is not given to us as it is with Anna, who is another woman who will see Jesus, recorded in Luke’s gospel for us. But Simeon—we’re not told much about. But we’re told that he sings the Nunc Dimittis, which we’re very familiar with in this church. It’s one of our typical songs of recessional, the end of the service.

“Lord, now let us thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen this salvation.”

So Nunc Dimittis—”now you’re letting depart”—so it’s a departure song. And we could see, I suppose, in these songs this movement: king, priest, angels uniting heaven and earth, and then the average person sings this song, this Christmas carol. And we can also sort of say a chronological movement in the life of humanity, I suppose. We have the mother, the child is incarnate in the womb. So we have this emphasis on the womb at the beginning. And then at the end, Simeon can depart in peace.

The first reference is to his death. And we can use it properly, departing from the service, the worship service, as a recessional. But we could also the same with Zacharias—we could look at Simeon as an example again of first humanity. And that humanity, you know, led by the priests of Israel, will depart in peace as the new world comes.

But in its most obvious meaning, he’s going to die peacefully. And as we look to our deaths, this is a song that’s been used by the church at deathbeds throughout the history of the church, because people are encouraged to die as Simeon died, departing in peace, focusing on the arrival that we celebrate every Christmas and every Lord’s day really—the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So it’s this wonderful picture of birth. And then as we’ll see in the Benedictus, the life that we’re to live. And then at the conclusion of these four songs, this song about dying well. Birth, living well, and dying well sort of form the thrust of these four songs—Mary’s song, Zacharias’s song, the angel’s song, and Simeon’s song. And we’re reciting them responsibly with some Old Testament reference throughout the service today. And we’ve already recited a few of them together.

So I want to talk about these songs. And I sort of changed the title. I was just going to call it “the four songs of Christmas,” but I referred to it now in your handouts as “singing in the dark.” It’s important to remember the context of the first Christmas songs.

The context was that nothing had changed. They were still oppressed by a very oppressive regime, the Roman Empire. They were still oppressed by church leaders who had really gotten into office through chicanery, money, bribery. Church and state were not doing well. Herod was actually the king—an Edomite. Can you get any worse than that? And a twisted, perverted one at that, who—what we know about him of course in relation to the Christmas story is that children were slaughtered, two years of age and under. Dark times, dark times for the average person as well who were living under oppression. From the communist Chinese, we could say, they were, you know, not free like we are, not prosperous like we are, not having religious freedom like we have. They were put out of the synagogue for saying the truth about Jesus, for instance.

They had horrible unemployment rates—to put it in economic terms, I think 35 percent. Inflation was rampant. Starvation was going on. You can’t understand the feeding of the five thousand or the other feedings of the New Testament without understanding that these people were really hungry. It wasn’t just a nice little miracle. It was provision of their daily bread for these people. Okay?

So times were dark, dark times. And yet those who have the eyes of faith instead of the eyes of sight, those who understand what’s going on in history, sang forth beautiful sounding rejoicing Christmas carols knowing that with the incarnation, the advent of Christ, everything had changed.

So they’re singing in the dark. And very frequently our Christmases are kind of dark, a little bit. Not dark like theirs two thousand years ago in Canaan. But we know that Christmas is a time of depression for some people. It’s a time when all your economic problems come to their forefront at Christmas time. Your sin can tend to bubble up. While it’s more blessed to give than to receive, frequently we’re a lot more interested in what we’re getting than what we’re giving. You can see this preeminently with our little children. Even in our homes, the Adamic nature is sort of fed sometimes by the frenzy of gift-giving. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing to consider each other, to stimulate love and good works, to think about each other, to give gifts to each other.

I love those times when I go shopping and think about children or people that I’m thinking of—try to think what would make their heart rejoice. But we all know too that what happens in our lives is we can be selfish, and then we’re disappointed. We’re always going to be disappointed if we think that ultimately what’s under the tree—if it isn’t the Lord Jesus Christ, ultimately, if it isn’t a picture of him—it’ll never bring satisfaction, right?

Simeon departs with satisfaction. And our culture, as it increasingly becomes secularized, as it attempts to replace Christmas with “holiday,” which is ironic, of course, because the secular term “holiday” is just a blur of the word “holy day.” So we’re going to replace Christmas with a holy day. Okay, I’m okay with that. No matter what we do, we’re always using God’s palette to try to paint. But there’s no doubt that our world is becoming increasingly secularized and Christianity is under attack. It will be so increasingly until God grant revival and reformation in our land and his sovereign predisposition—that hasn’t happened in great numbers yet.

So as it becomes secularized, our sin tendencies are here. So for lots of reasons, you know, our holidays have a tint of darkness to them. The golden age may come round, but it hasn’t made full its manifestation yet. And this came home for me personally this past week as we were going about doing our Christmas shopping the middle of last week. I got a call from one of my two brothers and he’d let me know that my sister had died last week. She’d had a fairly major heart attack a week and a half before that—triple bypass—but expected she would recover and she was going to go home the next day and didn’t.

So you know, darkness—things happen in the context of our holiday seasons that bring darkness to us. And the Lord God says, in the context of darkness, if we want to know how to respond to darkness, really, we can look at what they did, the incredible conditions of darkness. We can look and see what they saw, what they understood. And our darknesses turned to light with the coming of the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So let’s turn now to these four Christmas songs and talk about singing.

Actually, the first thing on your outline is Psalm 98—again, emphasizing the point that singing is sort of what Christmas is all about. Psalm 98, of course, is the psalm that Isaac Watts based “Joy to the World” upon. Yesterday I was listening to NPR and they had a news story about the Christmas services at the National Cathedral and they begin it with, you know, the choir everybody’s singing “Joy to the World.” It’s kind of one of the Christmas songs many people here probably like. Your favorite, I think I’m actually beginning to like our version of Psalm 98, the psalm that we sing, better than “Joy to the World,” somehow. But that’s okay.

Dr. Lord’s great song “Rolling Back of the Curse” is based on Psalm 98.

Psalm 98 is the middle of the fourth book of the Psalms. There are five very distinct books to the Psalms, ended with doxologies. The fourth book are Psalms 90 to 106. There’s a very obvious structure to that book. At the middle of it is Psalm 98—the coming of the King, the Lord Jesus Christ—is the middle of that entire book. That’s what the book is all about: the coming of the king and ultimately the coming of Jesus. And we won’t take time to look at the structure now, but it is important to recognize that the structure of this—the three stanzas of this song, this Christmas carol, Psalm 98—the middle stanza is all about these commands to break forth into song. We’re commanded to do that. We love to do it, but it’s a command as well.

And at the very middle of that, the singing that happens is singing that’s accompanied by musical instruments. So according to the Psalter, at least the fourth book, the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is going to be explicitly a time—no matter how dark the external conditions may be—it’s going to be explicitly a time of singing joyfully for what God has accomplished definitively once for all.

Mary’s song is going to—you know, and these songs we’re going to look at, they understood this: that once God visited personally, once he became incarnate in the womb of Mary, everything had changed. The forces were set in place. The Savior had come. The new creation had begun. The light would now shine. And this was the cause for great joy. And that joy was to be—singing, sort of—joy. And explicitly in Psalm 98, it’s singing accompanied by musical instruments.

Praise God for Freddy carrying on the great tradition here we’ve had for the last few years, playing trumpet in the worship service. This is what singing is all about: the joy of celebrating the advent of Jesus Christ. And while we can’t take time to look at it, if you want to look later at this structure I’ve given for you, what Psalm 98 is about is that the bipolarity of the old world—where you had the priestly nation of Israel and then the world apart from that—they were going to be made into one with the coming of Jesus. The division, the ultimate division that represented the implications, the results of the curse and the fall—this is what it represented. This two-fold division—this was going to be done away definitively.

And so Psalm 98 takes terminology that we don’t know necessarily. We don’t know the difference between earth and the world, the land and the world. We don’t think about it much, but these were two different terms. And the earth or the land is where Israel was. And the world was the rest of the creation. And the world was also portrayed sometimes by terminology like the seas or the waters—these are the Gentile nations.

So the point of Psalm 98, with the coming of Jesus, Jew and Gentile are brought together. And God’s kingdom, his special rule over his people, would extend over the entire face of the world. This is what our songs are. And as we’ll see, this is what these songs are. We won’t look at them in great detail, but this is what these songs are all about: there’s this movement from Israel to the Gentiles in these four songs. And we’ll see that.

So singing at the advent of Christ, the birth of Christ, remembrance of it, every Lord’s day, every day of our lives lived out of the new creation and particularly at this time of year—singing joyfully and if possible with musical instruments. This is the way to celebrate Christmas. There’s no other way. This is it. This is the penultimate way.

Let’s look first then at the Magnificat. This is found in Luke 1:46-55.

Let me say that to some of us who were familiar with the chant version of this. It’s my delight among many other blessings of King’s Academy this past year. We had initiated chapel services here—fifteen minutes every morning, Monday through Friday—that I have the pleasure and privilege to lead and choose the songs for. And so for the month of December we sang this chant quite a bit. And I think Rosanne also taught the students this in their music class as well.

So there’s a wonderful chant version of this that James B. Jordan taught us many years ago. It’s just delightful. By the way, my thanks to the King’s Academy students who gave me a gift this morning upon arrival here as well for my teaching of them this year. I really appreciate that. What a wonderful time of year to show love to one another in unexpected ways. And I greatly appreciate that.

Well, this Magnificat then—Mary sings this wonderful song. And let’s look at it just a bit. On the handouts, page two, I think this is on. You’ve got a way I’ve structured this. These are not—I don’t, you know, I’m not going to—I wouldn’t go to the stake for these structures, but I think that some of it is rather obvious and some isn’t, but some is. And I think it sort of helps us when we look at these blocks of text to sort of look at the focal point and how they move.

And you’ll see that what I’ve done is there’s sort of two stanzas to this song. The first stanza is personal. It’s about Mary specifically. It’s what God has done in relationship to her. The second stanza is corporate.

You see, in the middle of the first stanza: “He has regarded the lowliest estate of his maidservant. Henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” At the middle of the second stanza: “He has exalted the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things.” So the reversal there is more general. It’s not about Mary specifically. It’s more general. And the whole second stanza is about Israel.

So you know, the first thing we notice here is that our songs are individual songs of joy and blessing, but they’re corporate as well. And Mary’s song takes into account her own individual state but then the implications of what happens to her individually for Israel as a group as well.

And I think that at the very middle then of this first stanza, we have this reversal. Magnificat is always spoken about as “the great reversal” because that’s clearly at the heart of both stanzas: a reversal.

The lowly—he has regarded the lowly estate of his handmaidaden. “Behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” Mary has gone through a great reversal, lowly state. She’s a common person, really, of the kingly line, but she’s a handmaidaden. She’s a handservant of God and Jesus. But she’s pregnant and became pregnant prior to marriage. And so we could think of this lowly estate of hers just in terms of everyone’s lowly estate—those who understand their humility before God, those who understand that we’re doing better than we deserve. And she’s that.

But even more, in the eyes of those around her, she’s disdained because of what they assume wrongly about her morality. Well, she comes to a point of reversal. “All generations will call me blessed.” I mean, you know, that’s lowly estate, low down. All of a sudden she becomes the preeminent picture of an individual manifestation or example—illustration of the church of Jesus Christ. We should think about Mary more in Protestant circles. We just should. She’s the handmaidaden of the Lord, and may God grant us that we also see ourselves as handservants of God and of Christ.

So there’s this great reversal at the center, and moving out from that it talks about, you know, how this reversal is affected. “My spirit has rejoiced in God, my Savior. He who is mighty has done great things for me.” So her state of being reversed is due to the salvific nature of the power and strength of Almighty God. And the end result of this reversal of Mary is her praise of God.

The first and concluding portions of that first stanza: “My soul magnifies the Lord. Holy is his name.” So we’ve got the name of the Lord at either end of this. And at the middle, by the way, we have the term God. And in the second verse: “My spirit has rejoiced in God, my Savior.” Again, Lord—the covenant name of God. God—his strength. God—matches up with “he who is mighty has done great things.”

So God is the strong one. He’s done these wonderful mighty things for me. He’s reversed my state. And the end result of this is that Mary magnifies, she multiplies, she praises. She praises the name of the Lord and declares that his name is holy. So you know what she does? She does to the glory of the Lord. Purpose of man is to glorify God. And the purpose of the reversal that we experience individually is to bring us to a place of exalting and glorifying the Lord in his holy name.

At the middle, now recognize too, by the way, that the reversal happens to a servant. She is humble before God. All right? She’s a servant before God. Her spirit rejoices not in the things around her but rather in God. So the reversal happens for the humble in heart. Okay?

We can tend to get kind of puffed up in the context of the world in which we live as Christians—and those that are trying real hard to do what’s right educationally, vocationally, terms of our finances. We can get sort of puffed up. But we must remember in our Christmas songs that Christmas is the rejoicing of what Jesus has done for the humble, for the lowly in mind.

And this same truth is pictured in the second stanza. You see in the middle there: “He has put down the mighty from their seats. Exalted the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” Fantastic, right? So you know, those that rule not for God, the mighty are removed. And he exalts the lowly, he’s filled the hungry, and the rich he sends empty away.

So at the very heart of the second stanza is this reversal again. Now the reversal includes both the exaltation of those who are humble before him and their state before God—who recognize their poverty—but it’s also the reversal is shown in the effect upon those who reject God. And so it’s a two-edged sword here at the middle of this song as it develops out to the whole world, or to Israel, at least.

And so, it at the very center of the second stanza—reversal. And again, it’s reversal, not for everybody. It’s a reversal—I mean, it’s a positive reversal, not for everyone. It’s a positive reversal for those who are humble before God, for those who are hungry, need to be filled, for those who are lowly before God, for those who need for God to show strength with his arm.

It says that “he has helped his servant Israel.”

To sing this song, you must be God’s servant. You see, right? To sing the Magnificat and to identify with it, you must identify yourself as a servant of God. You must identify yourself as Israel. What does the name mean? It means ruled by God. And by implication, ruling for God. Israel—ruled by God—to be ruled by God as his servant and also to rule whatever we’re given to rule for him. This is what Israel is.

And again, this helps us to understand the words of the Magnificat because, as I pointed out many times in this church over the last twenty, twenty-one years, the reversal is seen in the three-fold aspect of man.

The very center of these things—about those who do not rule as Israel for God and not ruled by God. It refers to our dominical aspect of how we rule in our families, over our bodies, ourselves, in the terms of the church, the state, kings, all this stuff. How we rule, how we exercise kingship under the Lord Jesus Christ. And then the idea of the rich and the hungry. This has to do with the consecration of the goods that we have for the purposes of God.

If we’re humble before God, then whatever riches he’s given to us, we’re to use them for him as proper priests. Priests consecrate things for the use of God, right? They take the stuff in the temple, they consecrate it, and they use it only for holy purposes. And as priests, we’re to take the good things that God gives us, the things that we have stewardship over, and consecrate them for the King. You see, this is Israel—those who are ruled by God, who rule for God, and who consecrate things as true priests.

And then just before this, the statement is that “he is scattered the proud imagination of their hearts.” If our intellect is puffed up and prideful before God, we’re going to be brought down in the reversal. This refers to the prophetic nature of man. Man is a prophet. He’s to speak and understand knowledge based upon the word of God. Pride abolishes that. Humility before God makes us again prophets.

So the reversal is prophet, priest, and king. It’s all three. But it’s those people who want to use their minds, think God’s thoughts, bring every thought captive to Christ, those who want to bring all their possessions captive to Christ, and those who want to bring every aspect of how they rule captive to Christ. These are the people—and only the people—who can rejoice as Mary rejoiced here.

There’s a reversal. But just as it was to the humble maidservant, it’s to the humble here in mind and in ruling and in the use of their possessions that God grants this tremendous reversal. In relationship to that: “He has shown strength of his arm. How this is how he helps his servant Israel.”

Again, the strength of God. All these things are past tense. It’s not as if what’s going to happen will eventually produce this. With the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, Mary can speak in the prophetic past tense. God has now accomplished all things. There’s no stopping it. Once God has visited his people, this reversal, this new creation is here now. Mary said, and will inevitably work itself out.

“He helps us through his strength. His mercy is on them that fear him.” And then at the end of that second stanza: “In remembrance of his mercy.”

So book ends around this great reversal of the mercy of God. We don’t deserve it. The Lord God is gracious to us. It’s his mercy. You see? And again, this means that we can’t sing the song unless we’re humble before God. It’s his mercy that bounds this great reversal and the change of men, the diminishment of the old Adam, the coming of the second Adam, the new creation in which men will use their intellect, their possessions, and rule for God Almighty.

This reversal is to those who recognize their need for mercy, for those who fear him, who reverently obey him, who have a proper sense of dread of displeasing him. These are the people that God shows mercy to. It’s not the kind of, you know, the kind of mercy that goes out to everyone indiscriminately. That’s not the kind of mercy that’s existed here. As much as the world wants to make it that—at this time, why they want to celebrate a holiday when everybody gets blessed—it’s not. Some people get cursed here as a result of the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. The ones that don’t get cursed are the ones who recognize their need for mercy, those who fear God.

And this mercy is “from generation to generation, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever.” This is the fulfillment of the word of God. And if our Christmases are dark because we doubt God’s word to us, we have affirmation in each of these songs that the word of God has brought this to pass. It cannot change. Just as he promised to our fathers in the past to Abraham, so from generation to generation, this mercy will fill the world.

The Magnificat is a tremendous song of comfort and good cheer and rejoicing because of the great reversal that God has affected definitively once and for all.

Now we move to the Benedictus, and things change a little bit. Things move outward a little bit. There’s a little change here. There’s comfort certainly.

Now here I think we can think of this in terms of three stanzas. The first is a summary statement: “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel. He has visited and redeemed his people.” A summary statement that really, in a way, recaptures everything that Mary has said. Mary took the whole song to talk about the Lord, and then God, and then bring in Israel. But Zacharias here brings them all together: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel. He has visited.” And this is—this is the bookend, I suppose, of this.

Look down at the bottom: “With which the dayspring on high has visited us. Verse 78. To give light to those who sit in darkness.” The visitation of God is what Zacharias sings of—the incarnation again, the advent. Not a letter sent to us only, not a phone call, but an incarnational visit. And this is important for us. This is why we love to get together with people at Christmas—not just get cards. Cards are good, but to see people’s faces. This is what God does. He doesn’t just send a card. He sends his Son. An incarnational visit. And that’s what this visitation refers to.

This visitation has produced what Zacharias sings of here. “He has redeemed his people.” At first, he sings about what this is all about. And the second stanza is the next—the last stanza is about John the Baptist. And in the first one I’ve kind of laid it out. It seems like the same thing is repeated three times in a sequence.

So first it says: “He’s raised up a horn of salvation in the house of his servant David.”

And then repeating that in verse 72: “He performs the mercy promise to our father.”

So once more we have this idea that God’s word of promise has now been brought to fulfillment. So with Mary, he brings up the idea that God has fulfilled his word. And again, he speaks of “the house of his servant David.” We can think of Israel, but we can also think of priestly language, can’t we? Remember, this is a priest speaking, and the house of God—the temple that which he served—was a picture of the people of Israel. So he’s brought salvation to the house of Israel.

“He has raised up a horn.” Strength and might is the power of the horn. And again, a horn is imaged in the temple. There were a series of altars, each that had four horns. And so the horn of salvation—Zacharias is using priestly temple language here, I think, to talk about the import of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even though he’s using Davidic language, David’s son will build the house as David wanted to do.

And again, the reference to God’s word—”as he spoke by the mouth of his prophets”—and matching that to “remember his holy covenant,” his covenantal word is being fulfilled by God in this visitation.

To what end? “That we should be saved from our enemies, from the hand of all who hate us.”

And matching that: “To grant us that we being delivered from the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our lives.”

So Mary has implied this reversal, this deliverance from enemies, and implied that it will affect our lives. But Zacharias says it explicitly. God has redeemed us from our enemies. And the second part of this stanza tells us to what end? That we might serve him. We’re delivered from the hand of our enemies for a particular purpose—that we might serve him without fear of what’s going to happen in our lives.

The depression is frequently a sign of fearfulness. And God says at the coming of Jesus Christ, in our songs, when we sing, we become brave. It removes our fear—singing of what God has done. And Zacharias, his fear—the fear of the people is removed. “As he sings his song, he’s delivered us from the hand of our enemies that we might serve him without fear.”

Fear gets in the way of serving him. And the coming of Jesus Christ is the reversal of fear so that we can serve God in holiness and righteousness—in consecration to God, in accordance with his righteousness, justice, holiness—in reference to God, committed to him. But committed to him in the context of a life that is lived out in terms of our relationship with people. That’s what righteousness is—justice. You see? So the vertical and horizontal dimensions of our faith. All the days of our life. And as we’ll see, get to Simeon, and at the end of his life, he’s served God faithfully.

So this song—the second stanza of this song—adds to Mary’s song the idea that yes, there’s comfort. But there’s also a challenge in this song implied in Mary’s song in the reversal. But here stated explicitly. The challenge that this song brings to us is: will we serve God as a result of this good news? When we sing Christmas carols, will it be just lips service of our joy? Or will it really imply the carol message here—that what has happened and what we celebrate is for the purpose of serving God both in consecration to him and in righteousness in relationship to other people? And not just today, not just tomorrow, but all the days of our lives?

And then he sings about the coming of the third stanza—of John. Again, there, the idea is that “our feet are to be guided,” “the way of peace.” John comes—the verse tells us—”to prepare the ways of Christ.” He’ll go before the Lord to prepare his ways. But we are in those ways by the end of the section “to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Again, the challenge to us is to walk in the way of peace, God’s order. And this is accomplished by “the giving of the knowledge of salvation to his people by the remission of their sins.” This is the light that comes to us in darkness.

And at the heart of this: “Through the tender mercy of our God.” The mercy of God accomplishes these things—not just in destroying our enemies, but in destroying our greatest enemy, our sinfulness. Our sinfulness is added in this song. The reversal of our sinfulness. The remission of our sins that will be affected by the Savior’s coming. This is the mercy of God from God that brings about the light again.

That brings about the spirit of God here is moving. Begin to bring light out of darkness. So “the dayspring from on high has visited us to bring light to those who sit in darkness in the shadow of death.” Singing in the dark.

Singing because the new creation has come. Singing because the light of the Holy Spirit shines forth once more. Jesus—the east—has come. Dayspring—east. We’re being removed from the east of Eden where we were thrown out. The light comes and brings us back into the garden presence of God, to make the world again, according to the second Adam.

The dayspring comes, the new creation comes, and Zacharias sings of this new creation. He gives us comfort. Our enemies are dealt with. The strong arm of God has been revealed once more. And he tells us again that the implication of this is it’s to those who will serve him. He brings a challenge to us to walk in the light of the new creation, to do these things, to sing forth his blessing.

He says that he has brought reversal to our states to the end that we might serve him all the days of our lives.

And then the last two songs—the very short song, the Gloria in Excelsis. It says: “Glory to God in the highest.”

I mean, if we meditate on these first two carols, we join the angels’ refrain. If we think of the advent of Christ and what it will accomplish based on the carols of preparation of Mary and Zacharias, and the angels sing just what we want.

Promising: “Glory to God in the highest.” And then the wonderful truth: “On earth peace, goodwill to men.”

Heaven and earth linked together. That’s the angel’s song here. What’s going to happen with the advent of Christ is heaven and earth are going to be linked. And we can pray every day, every Lord’s day, that his will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus came to affect that will. He came to bring us into the light of the new creation. He came to make us one with God’s people—that we might also be Israel in Jesus Christ, who is the greater Israel, ruled by God and ruling for God in our prophetic, priestly, and kingly aspects.

“Glory to God in the highest. On earth peace, goodwill to men.” The highest and earth join now through the work of Jesus Christ, the new creation. And now the distinction between heaven and earth is diminishing and fading away. You know, the firmament is Jesus, and he mediates now the heavens to earth. And the light then fills the world. And new things are brought to pass.

And it’s on the basis of understanding this then that we can join with Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis in Luke chapter 2. Because these tremendous things have happened—heaven and earth have met, have kissed. “Glory to God in the highest. On earth peace. Goodwill toward men.” God has reversed all things. Those who are humble before him will now rule increasingly over time as they rule for him and are humble before him.

There’s this great comfort, and there’s this great challenge that the Benedictus brought to us—to live our lives, all of our lives, in relationship to God, to serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness, all the days of our lives. And this is possible because of what’s happened.

And so as we get to Nunc Dimittis, we get to the end of one’s life—one who has served God blamelessly. The text tells us this was a man who served him blamelessly, without fault. It doesn’t mean he was perfect, but it means he was perfect in the sense of obeying God all of his life, not slipping away into apostasy. When he sinned, he repented of his sin. And he didn’t do his right. He followed the prescriptions of God’s law to remind him of the coming of Jesus to take away those sins.

We can be that kind of person. We can join Simeon in this song. We can be those who look forward to the end of our lives as he did, saying, “Lord, now you’re letting your servant depart in peace.”

Again, as in all of these three human songs, “according to your word.” The word of God is what tells us, interprets the historical events that have happened, and God has fulfilled his word. And so Simeon can die in peace.

“Mine eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.”

You see, now what was implied in the Benedictus—that the light would go over the whole world—is now stated explicitly at the great and concluding one of these four carols. Because heaven and earth are brought together, the bipolarity of Israel and the world is done away with. And the New Testament will record that Jew and Gentile are brought together under the light of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is what Simeon sings about.

“My eyes have seen your salvation, the glory of your people Israel.” But at the heart of Simeon’s song is that the whole world will see the manifestation of Christ. “You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to all the world.”

We sing Christmas carols knowing that the whole world will join with our carols. That this is what history is. We can be confident of that. We know it. We know it the way these same saints knew it—not by sight, but we knew it by faith. We know it by faith. They knew it by faith. They understood the word of God. They understood the implications of the incarnation—that the second creation, the light has now begun to shine. The spirit has moved once more. And out of the darkness will bring light. Out of the formlessness of the world as it was then, God would make pathways that we might walk in. And the Lord God would once again make his people prosperous. He would fill our voidness.

Tremendous songs here. Tremendous Christmas carols that inform every one of our carols that we sing. Singing is of the essence.

But you know, we return to what I said earlier. There is this tremendous picture of the great reversal. There’s this tremendous comfort and challenge that Zacharias brings. There’s the wedding of heaven and earth that the angels sing of. And there’s the implication that the new creation will fill all the world and that we can live our lives and depart in peace at death as Simeon did because of what has been accomplished with the incarnation of Jesus.

All those things are true. But just like them, we often sing these songs in darkness. We sing these songs lamenting the lack of our fullness, our voidness, our darkness at times for whatever reason—whether it’s the sort of sadness that myself and my extended family are experiencing with my sister, recognizing our own failures in terms of loving other people the way we should, whether it’s not feeling loved by other people, whether it’s undue fear and anxiety over this world that now thrashes against Christmas and wants to change it to “holiday” greetings.

As we see secularism—the Pope is right—the great enemy of the church today, spreading ever more incessantly over the face of the world. It seems like things are getting a little darker in the short term. But we can sing in the midst of our darkness—whether it’s personal or corporate. We can sing the great joy of knowing that the future is bright. It’s the light of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We can look at history for the last two thousand years. Nothing has been the same. Everything has changed. The music that’s been developed is the picture. That every Christmas season with a tremendous amount of music, beauty, different styles—all brought into submission to celebrate the birth of the King of Kings. This is the way world history moves.

And whether we’re in a dip in our lives personally or if we’re in a dip in the context of the history of the world, we know the future. We can sing with joy and gladness in the midst of darkness because we know that the Lord Jesus Christ has come and produced a second creation in which the Lord God is progressively rolling back the curse as far as it is found.

This is the joy of the Christmas season. This is the joy of the wonderful songs we sing based upon these original Christmas carols from the Gospel of Luke.

Let’s thank God.

Lord God, we do give you thanks and praise for the beauty and wonder of this day and what we celebrate. We thank you, Lord God, for these wonderful songs that you built into our Bibles, into the very story of the Advent of Jesus in that manger two thousand years ago. We thank you, Lord God, for telling us that this story is an opera in which people burst forth into song.

May our lives today be filled with song. May we enter into the singing, the corporate singing of this church, and may we sing individually as well. As Mary recognized the implications for her as a person and her as part of the body of Christ as well. May our singing this season be real, strong, and joyful in spite of whatever darkness you and your providence may have brought for a moment into our lives.

Help us Lord God to sing in the light of the Savior.

In his name we ask it. Amen.